"
Constance laughed again, so fully did the accountant's obligingness
reassure her.
"That is a good idea, my friend," she said. "Thank you. And au revoir,
monsieur; we will take charge of your future if you behave sensibly."
At this moment, however, she was thunderstruck by an extravagant and
seemingly senseless incident. Morange, having shown Alexandre out of the
little salon, in advance of himself, turned round towards her with the
sudden grimace of a madman, revealing his insanity by the distortion of
his countenance. And in a low, familiar, sneering voice, he stammered in
her face: "Ha! ha! Blaise at the bottom of the hole! He speaks, he has
spoken to me! Ha! ha! the somersault! you would have the somersault! And
you shall have it again, the somersault, the somersault!"
Then he disappeared, following Alexandre.
She had listened to him agape with wonder. It was all so unforeseen, so
idiotic, that at first she did not understand it. But afterwards what a
flash of light came to her! That which Morange had referred to was the
murder yonder--the thing to which they had never referred, the monstrous
thing which they had kept buried for fourteen years past, which their
glances only had confessed, but which, all of a sudden, he had cast in
her teeth with the grimace of a madman.
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